Hey folks, Harry here... One of the reasons that I was able to talk Mel Gibson into giving me THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST to screen at Butt-Numb-A-Thon, a film orgy of cosmic proportions, was because of the audience and the way I choose them. Specifically each year I get around 3000 applicants for Butt-Numb-A-Thon. This year I had everyone write a little essay on why they wanted to come, their favorite films, what they do and who they are. THEN - out of those 3000, I pick the 230 people that are the most in love with cinema, that most need the experience of what it is I'm putting together. That need to sit next to who I placed them next to. That are the people that never get chosen for anything, anywhere... or that have amazing luck all the time. The point is to pick, the perfect film going audience, that comes to this tiny theater to see their hopes and dreams. They don't know anything specific. I often say, "Money doesn't get you into Butt-Numb-A-Thon, faith does." That isn't a religious thing, it's about having faith enough in the programming to do what it takes to get in. Mel loved the idea that only the owner of the Alamo Drafthouse and I would know that he and the film would be coming. That the audience would have NO CLUE that they were seeing this. He loved the challenge of his film having to be the last film on an 24 hour period of great cinema. And he wasn't afraid to follow RETURN OF THE KING. Below you'll find two people that absolutely loved the film, but came to the movie from radically different backgrounds. 1st is Saffy. Saffy met her husband in the AICN Chat Room and now lives in Houston with two daughters and was raised Catholic, but could best be described as a lapsed Catholic in some ways. Here ya go...

I don’t normally write reviews. Personally, I don’t usually believe I can because I become so emotional and I lack a lot of technical knowledge about film. Sure, I can go on a diatribe about the importance of Bene-tint to the way they do make-up in period pieces, or how Lucidity foundation paired with cool colored lighting casts an ethereal glow on the skin…but who the hell wants to hear about that? Well OK. Besides me and the cast of Queer Eye.

There are first times for everything, and paired with the first time I am writing a review was the first time I truly got to see what my emotional response to a movie was actually worth. I am going to review The Passion.

The visual look to this film was one part silent movie, one part mystic awakening and one part nightmare. It places you where you need to be, immediately uncomfortable yet familiar enough to go on. Visually this movie stimulates emotionally like nothing out there right now. It creeps…it doesn’t flash in your eyes, it engulfs. The camera doesn’t just film Caviezel, its star. It embraces and caresses him. Even in his darkest hour he expresses such a sense of knowing. Not the typical righteous stoicism we see in the usual film portrayals of Jesus, but a deep sense of spiritual knowing. So that even if you don’t believe in “the Jesus Story,” you can believe that Jesus was someone who possessed an inner quality of peace and forgiveness.

The story takes the Passion (something that I am very familiar with, growing up catholic) and makes it something I could never imagine: it makes it real. We see Jesus’ humanity. That he liked to joke, that he loved his mother, and that he truly suffered. Those turned off by the sometimes pompous, judgmental, “fire and brimstone” vision of Jesus will be able to remove the man from the religion that has built up around his followers. We also see in this movie the pain of his mother, a woman who doesn’t see the supposed blasphemer or messiah, but sees her only son suffer and die. The movie gives a heart to the most unlikely characters, the Romans. We see so much in this move, the political motives for the crucifixion, the dire position people were put in and how this story HAD to enfold like it did. We also see a more female vision of Christianity. The women were the brave followers of Jesus in this film, and were not relegated to a few weeping biddies on the sidelines. They were the ones begging for Jesus, stepping in front of Roman soldiers to give him comfort, the ones weeping at the foot of the cross. Mary, the mother taken off a two dimensional iconic painting and given soul and strength; something movies AND religion have failed to do.

Taking on a movie about Jesus that isn’t pontificating and damning you for all eternity for not believing must’ve been a task unlike any other. No matter what Gibson does with this it is going to offend someone. It has even started to offend those who have never seen it. But guess what? He still did it and he did it majestically. This isn’t an “Onward Christian Soldiers” film. This was a film about a man who spread a message that was misunderstood, and about the people who loved him. The anti-semitism buzz about the film, well I have to address it because there are things that I can see might offend if you don’t step back and realize that almost everyone in the movie is Jewish, from the Pharisees who condemn, to the Pharisees who defend, the apostles who fought, and the man who bravely picked up the cross for Jesus and held him in his pain.

I don’t know how critical I can actually be about this movie because…I wept. It hit me like an emotional anvil and opened up and healed many battle scars I have had with my spiritual convictions. I remembered through this movie that it was all about love and it isn’t the message that turned me off so many years ago but the way the message was presented. The message has been resurrected, the movie made it move and breathe, it made it real yet divine. This is art in its highest form, and even though Mr Gibson claims it’s not finished, it was, in my mind, perfection.

P.S.- Mel Gibson is ICE COLD. I had him all pegged wrong. He is an artist and a DAMN COOL GUY. Keith Richards…oysters…England…PRICELESS!

Ok... so now we move on to Abstruse, here's a sometimes chatter in the AICN Chat that in his initial letter to me to get into BNAT - he bemoaned the fact that he lives in a town where the only theater is owned by a right-wing Christian couple that won't let films like KILL BILL VOL 1 play. That he's never seen a film with a truly great audience and how he wanted to see films that he would never otherwise see. Now I learn he's an atheist to boot... here ya go...